Lessons from graduate school: be careful how you write

This year, I am completing my Master’s degree in convergence journalism at Mizzou this semester through May. In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of posts of some of my most interesting observations from graduate school.

One of the biggest realizations made is how many different writing styles I have learned and read throughout my education. The nature of being in journalism grad school, studying strategic communication and learning research methods to write a thesis exposes me to different writing methods each day. Let’s review three distinct types of writing:

• Writing for business: This is how creative briefs and points of view are written in the advertising industry. Business language and fancy words are acceptable, and each sentence must be clear, crisp and concise. A lot of bullet points and rationales are used here, but each individual word chosen matters.

• Writing hard news stories: News is written in the inverted pyramid style, providing the most important facts at the top and moving down from there. Hard news is very factual, with information given and quotations from reputable sources used to support or exemplify it. The story is written with language you would use conversationally; for example, I would write "he said" and not "he exclaimed" as in literature. One of my professors describes news writing with the goal of describing what has happened, what the implications are and if it could happen again. 

• Writing about research: This one baffles me the most because the writing style is full of jargon, obvious transition phrases and often in first person. For my qualitative research and mass media seminar courses, I read articles that fit this description every day. They begin with an abstract, which usually states something like “In this paper, I will review the eight ways you can accomplish these three goals in journalism. The theory I propose implies that there is a relationship between x and y, and we will look at 5 interviews showing how.” Writing is pretty much an outline with subheads, descriptions and a lot of foreshadowing. Overall, writing for research is explaining a method for research, providing your findings and analyzing the implications from your perspective.

My favorite part about reading writing for research is the amount of words that authors and researchers make up. Interactionism, operationalize, cathection…none of those are in the dictionary. The amount of times I have to switch between both reading and writing styles on a daily basis is absurd. I will write a paper on interviews as qualitative research one hour, write a news story for Missouri Business Alert the next and then review Mojo Ad's creative briefs for this semester's campaigns. 

My biggest tips for managing different reading and writing styles on a regular basis as a graduate student are getting in the zone and considering your audience. Remember what the assignment is and which type of writing is best. The mindset needed to read research is a lot different than reading a news story. Be prepared to write to your audience: whether it's undergraduate students, other master's students, adjunct professors or professors with doctoral degrees. Each will ask different questions about what they read; some want the rationale clear and specified, others want it grounded in your writing. 

I've also noticed that my email writing sometimes incorporates all three of these unintentionally.  Technically, email should be categorized as writing for business, but sometimes I'll write my emails in outline for if I have just read some research stories. But then you have to remember- emails are supposed to be brief and get the point across, not become an outlined paper! Therefore, if you're going to be a grad student, be aware that each of these writing styles requires a different mindset to comprehend and express yourself.